iPad Pro Gets 3D Touch Through Apple Pencil Hack

It may be Apple's newest, biggest (best?) tablet yet, but Apple still found a way to keep us holding out for the iPad Pro 2. Rather than going the whole hog and packing the maxi-tab with all the current-gen Apple innovations, the Cupertino company failed to put 3D Touch controls into the iPad Pro. It'll inevitably land with the next-gen version of the slate, but that's not stopped one plucky tinkerer from getting a facsimile of the feature running on the tablet.

Hamza Sood jailbreaked iOS 9 on an iPad Pro, and tweaked some of the system code that determines how the new Apple Pencil interacts with the oversized tablet. Specifically, Sood shows off a proof of concept that, seeing as the Apple Pencil has a pressure sensitive nib, proves Apple could quite easily introduce 3D Touch controls to the tablet at least via its stylus.

3D Touch currently features on the Apple Watch, iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, allowing a "right click" of sorts on the mobile devices by sensing different degrees of pressure in a user's push. This opens up shortcuts to secondary functions within apps, without having to dig through menus to find them. The iPad Pro lacks 3D Touch as it requires a special detection layer that sits beneath the screen's glass, but Sood's solution circumvents that quite elegantly, providing you don't want to hard-prod your tablet with your fingers.

Should you want to test it out on your own jailbroken iPad Pro, the source code can be found over on GitHub. [9to5Mac]